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this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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I looked myself and the term sucks goes back a bit farther than that, though, at least in England. "Sucks to your Auntie!", is an Old English insult meaning "your Auntie be damned!". It was said by a character in Lord of the Flies in 1954. Sinister Street was written by Compton MacKenzie in 1913 and has a sentence that reads, "This kid's in our army, so sucks!".
The term gained popularity in the US in the 1960s, and it isn't really clear whether it reached America from England, or whether Americans reinvented the term from scratch with its own connotations. That being said, I'm sure many if not most people in the US used the term with the intent to imply negativity with regards to homosexuality back when the phrase was new.
Nowadays, I think the the term has been largely separated from its' negative correlation to fellatio. Personally, I never even realized the correlation until I was very far into my adulthood, and most people my age never used the word with that meaning in mind at all.
This is kind of my point - the majority population never has any reason to think about the origin or evolution of our synonyms for bad, we just pick them up from usage - usage by older people who may have racist or xenophobic intent, or may have picked the terms up by osmosis themselves. That's how the slurs get engrained in language. But I'm willing to bet, even if you don't actively think of 'sucks' as connected to fellatio, that you've used 'sucks dick' or 'sucks balls' as an emphatic. (If your emphatic is 'sucks eggs,' then you're even older than I imagine, and please forgive my ageism ;) )
Oh then I misunderstood what you meant by your original comment. Thanks for making me think about it, I never really thought about some of the origins of our seemingly mundane slang.